


Hold On To Each Other

by volpeanon



Category: Prototype (Video Games)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Only Short, Post-Game, The Sads, i'm a fukken wimp i couldn't handle it being any longer, my style of fic writing where a problem arises for .5 of a second before i solve it bcos i'm crying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:21:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23134579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volpeanon/pseuds/volpeanon
Summary: Alex Mercer doesn't age. Robert Cross does.
Relationships: Robert Cross/Alex Mercer
Comments: 15
Kudos: 56





	Hold On To Each Other

Robert had had grey in his hair since Alex met him. It took some looking for, just a few strands hidden at his temples, and Alex honestly didn't think much about it - the big white stripe made it hard to take a handful of grey for what it was. It wasn't until the day he looked across the room and Robert caught the light from the low sun streaming in through their window, and there was a patch of silvery streaks he could see from all that way away. He realised Robert wasn't just grey, he was getting greyer.

When Alex looked at his own face in the mirror, he seemed the same as ever.

It sat ugly at the back of his mind, and he shut the door on it, locked it away. Every so often, though, he would hear it scratching. Mornings when Robert needed Alex to work his shoulder gently before it would start to move like it should; the chair that appeared on the back porch so Robert could sit with his morning coffee instead of stand; the 'weaker than that, it's been giving me headaches' when Alex made it for him; the grimace when he got up from sitting down for a long time and the stiff way he walked for ten minutes afterwards.

_ It's what happens when you live a life as active and full of injuries as he has, _ Alex told the door. The scratching on the other side didn't stop.

Their hikes never got any shorter. There was a ridge with the perfect view they'd been visiting for years, they weren't about to abandon it. But Alex watched how the sun was dipped lower and lower, incrementally, by the time they'd reached it. He noticed the first night the sleeping bag wasn't enough and Robert started shivering. Alex said nothing, just put his biomass on overdrive until he was as good as a heated blanket. He combed his fingers through Robert's fading hair and tried not to let the sobs shake him awake.

He had been fighting the knowledge for years. He tried not to look in the mirror any more, to catch his reflection in windows. For all that he'd learnt and grown, this was what pushed him back into bad habits - he ignored it, he put the lid on it, and pretended it could stay there.

He cleaned up yet another full cup of coffee abandoned and gone cold where it was made, saying nothing, thinking studiously of other things, not of the time he found the stove left on, or the last few times the door was left unlocked; not the full head grey hair he buried his nose in every night, or pretending not to be woken up by the soft sounds of restlessness and three AM pacing in the living room. When Robert grumbled about the size of newspaper print and Alex noticed he'd upped the size of the interface on his cellphone, Alex pressed his lips together on a "you need glasses, you old idiot". Something soft and loving that would make them laugh in a world where Alex wasn't living with a terror in his bones that threatened to suffocate him if he thought about it.

And then Robert meandered into the kitchen asking "Hey, Alex? When's Dana's lot visiting again?"

Alex looked at him. "She cancelled, June's operation got pushed back. She called yesterday. You answered the phone, remember?"

"Did I?" he huffed a laugh, pulled a glass out of a cupboard, and froze as he turned back. "W- Alex?" 

Alex's crumpled face overflowed, he sagged against Robert's catching arms, strong still by normal standards, but not so firm as Alex could remember them being "Hey, hey- what's wrong?"

He couldn't word it at first. He clung and buried his face in Robert's neck and bit his lip to muffle the hiccuping sobs. He got to be held and comforted and told it would all be okay, if he asked Robert would do it for a month straight - what he wanted was to believe it, to lie there together and trace the lines on Robert's face and love them as part of him instead of something horrible and creeping.

"Please," Robert murmured against Alex's temple "Talk to me."

He took a shuddering breath. "You keep forgetting things, you keep-" the grief closed his throat.

"C'mon, it's not that bad," Robert rubbed his back soothingly "I'm doing pretty good for seventy-six. Nobody's memory’s perfect when they're old."

"But  _ I'm _ not old! I'm just the same, nothing’s different! I can't-"

"Technically, you're not even forty. You're barely due a midlife crisis."

He couldn’t bear to laugh. “What am I gonna do when you’re gone? A fucking nuke couldn’t kill me, I don’t want to be on my own.”

Robert’s hands fell still, Alex’s muffled crying the only sound in the room. It seemed like a physical thing was pressing down on their shoulders, and for once Robert didn’t tell him ‘it’s going to be okay’ - he wasn’t in the habit of empty words or lies.

They called it an early night, curled up against each other painfully aware of every breath and every beat of their hearts in unison. Alex stayed awake like a vigil to keep the thing looming in the edges of the room at bay. But in the intense quiet, voices that had been silent for years drifted from the deep, and he couldn’t say if he’d called on them subconsciously or if they came of their own volition.

He was Blacklight. He had forgotten. He hadn’t been an infected, a runner, a whole new expression of personhood, for decades now. None of that mattered out here - where he was just Alex, where he’d finally shaken off the last of ‘Codename Zeus’ on a hot, raucous, impromptu summer night with Wisemen cheering and the words ‘I do’.

The distant impulses rippled - he belatedly recognised Elizabeth Greene’s hazy memories, half incomprehensible with the overpowering viral urges she had given in to. She offered him something in the dark. 

Breakfast was quiet the next morning. He sank into Robert pressing close to him, had to smile when he tossed things into the sink to come back to sit beside him and put an arm around him; the only times he’d ever got Robert to leave things sitting around uncleaned were when he’d lifted him bodily away from them.

He meant to give it a few days. He made it until just after lunch. Robert was side-eyeing him, feeling something was up but hesitant to bring it up if it was more pain he couldn’t fix. Alex perched on the back of the sofa, kneading at Robert’s stiff shoulder as his head sagged against Alex’s knee.

“I can-” he swallowed. There wasn’t an easy way to word it. “How bad does it hurt?”

“Better now.” Robert murmured, a smile deepening the creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth “It’s bearable.”

“I could make it better.”

“Oh?”

“I could fix it. I could fix everything. Your knee, and your ankle, and your back. I could fix the coffee headaches. And I could- I could make it so you can run like you used to, you said you missed running. I could fix it.”

Robert turned his head slightly. “Are you-?”

“And you’d sleep better. Or you wouldn’t need to sleep, you get to choose, we could do twice as much. And you wouldn’t need pills for anything ever again, you hate pills. You wouldn’t need-”

Robert reached up, taking his hand. “Tell me.”

“If I-” Alex leant down, burying his nose in Robert’s hair “If I infected you, we could- you’d be-”

“Alex,” he wasn’t expecting the quiet laugh “Listen to yourself. You sound like you’re trying to sell it. Are you even infectious? I figured if I was going to get anything from you, I’d already have it.”

“I can control every cell in my body,” he mumbled “I worried about it before, I made sure I wouldn’t. I just… kind of forgot I was doing it.”

“Is it that easy?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Fucking hell,” the laugh grew, and Robert craned his head back to catch Alex’s nose with a kiss “What are you waiting for then?”

“Are you sure?” he didn’t know why he asked, if Robert had said ‘no’ Alex would have spent the rest of his life trying to convince him.

“Alex. What was that bullshit about fixing me? C’mere.” their lips met, Alex cupping his jaw like he was made of paper, motions they’d gone through thousands of times that he still savoured and committed to memory “I wouldn’t give a fuck if I had to lose my legs for it. I care if I get to stay with you. I care if you never have to be alone.”

“I know,” Alex mumbled against his lips, smiling even as the tears caught in his eyelashes “I’m just- scared. I can’t think of anything worse than-”

“Don’t think about it.” a thumb brushed across his closed eyes “How do we do this?”

“Just relax. It’s not gonna be that comfortable. I need to get a lot into you, fast.”

"That sounds like a pickup line."

"I mean, I thought about it, but I don't think it would end well."

Robert started to laugh, and then the tendrils, needle sharp, embedded themselves in his skin. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is my house, sad dead gays don't exist in it. THE SAD IS THE MEANS TO THE HAPPIER END. And Alex and Cross tearing through the wilderness as gay-ass superpowered cryptid husbands is a thing I need.


End file.
